Print

VMware

Did You Know


VMware RSS Feeds have moved
  • VMware RSS Feeds Have Moved
    The VMware RSS feeds have moved. Please visit http://www.vmware.com/subscribe.html to subscribe to the new feeds. Thank you.The VMware Team
  • vExpert Spotlight: Simon Gallagher
    vExpert Spotlight: Simon Gallagher Blog URL:  http://www.vinf.net Twitter handle: @vinf_net Current employer: Freelance Infrastructure Architect working in the EMEA consulting team of a major global service provider How did you get into IT? Being a Lego nerd as a child architecture and engineering was my main interest as I grew up and I wanted to be a civil engineer designing bridges. I had a passing interest in computers and took a computer science A-level at 16 along with physics and chemistry (oh, and art..!), I quickly picked up Pascal, C and C++ and Assembler and I loved it and spent many hours coding and disassembling other people's code. That, combined with the last economic downturn in the UK laying waste to the engineering and building sector sealed my fate in IT rather than civil engineering. I achieved both ends of the spectrum in my A-level results (top marks for Computer Science, less said about Art the better ;)), and in 1995 I went to the University of Brighton to be near the beach, oh.. And study Computer Science  University was my first exposure to the Internet, having only had limited access to bulletin board systems at home and I immediately got it, I recall being frustrated that I couldn't find reviews or details for my 1st car on-line.. Oh how things have changed! I lived in a shared house with some course mates and we immediately set about building the most ridiculous student home network ever, we had Netware, NT 10Base-2 cabling all over the place and shared dial-up Internet to a local ISP (Mistral), they only realised in later years how much money they lost out on through our local cable co's free local call policy as it was set to auto-redial 24/7 :) Whilst at university a friend and I went into business providing network services to a local SMB reseller, we did everything from cabling to servers, proxies and email systems for small shops to golf courses and schools, it was long hours but it worked well part-time around my studies, I learnt way more doing this than I ever learnt at university and my experiences in infrastructure and networking was far more fulfilling than coding :) although my formal education did give me a good appreciation of documentation and research. I did a sandwich degree so spent a year working for a reseller/VAR in Brighton, just before I started they were purchased by GE and merged into it's IT services division so I spent a year working on Novell and OS/2 to NT4 migrations for large insurance and retail companies and providing internal 1st/2nd line support for their enterprise network, as part of the prerequisites for the placement they paid for a CBT course and for us to pass at least 3 MCP exams, which I did and continued on to get my MCSE. When I graduated from university, I went to work for a swiss watch maker in London, providing IT support and doing some IT refresh projects, after a year I was approached about a job with a small managed services company working with EMI music, I was interviewed in the basement of EMI's offices by the founder of Infocom (latterly becoming ioko, and then part of Kit-Digital), the guys were great and offered me the job on the spot, which I accepted and I spent the next 10 years working for what became ioko, initially working on Active Directory and Exchange migration projects for EMI and Diageo.  As the business grew so did my role and I was an early member of our professional services team, doing pre-sales and project delivery mainly in the Microsoft space and latterly virtualization, the company grew into the media/broadcast space and I worked on some great large scale video-on-demand projects as well as traditional IT infrastructure. Ioko was a great company and I made some excellent friends but after 10 years I was looking for a new challenge, I originally planned to set out on my own as a freelancer but I was offered a job within the cloud practice at VMware,  it sounded like a great role, doing working with early-access customers using vCloud Director and building delivery materials for the field, I met some fantastic people at VMware but eventually came to realise that working for a software vendor in what was evolving back into a project delivery role wasn't for me, I had a number of personal and business projects that I could not carry out whilst working for VMware so I reverted to my original freelance plan, which is what I am still doing today, I enjoy the freedom to work on my own projects and being able to manage my career and personal development more closely. How did you get into working with VMware and becoming a 2011 vExpert? I first read about VMware Workstation in a magazine article in 2000, I was instantly hooked and used it to build various complex network and server labs for my studies, I built my own home-brew version of GSX server using Workstation on a Windows 2000 machine using a whole bunch of batch files to copy about VMDK files and start/stop VM, because I was doing so much AD/Exchange migration work it made the most sense as I could build out complex multi-domain environments and test and roll-back infinitely without waiting weeks for people to build out labs, I could turn up with a couple of laptops and have it done by lunchtime. I got to build my first ESX server around version 2.5 as it was very hard for a non-large reseller to get evaluation versions in the early days. I built a lot of complex test and development environments for customers, ioko had grown into a sizeable managed services provider and I saw an opportunity to build a multi-tenant environment using ESX 3 to deliver customer solutions faster, cheaper and more flexibly; so we ended up building a very early implementation of a cloud. Since my university days I have always maintained a large and ever-evolving home lab environment, when I found you could virtualise ESX itself I was blown-away, and I spent a lot of my own time and money on the various incarnations of my vTARDIS project (http://vinf.net/vTARDIS). Whilst at BriForum in Amsterdam in 2007 I decided to start a blog to try and organise my notes a bit better, and it just grew from there. My blog is http://vinf.net which is supposed to stand for V(ritual) Infrastructure (.net) and I am sure someone told me 4-letter domain names were the most memorable so rather than deliberate over names I tried the JFDI approach and here I am, as unpronounceable as it is ;) About this time I started attending the London VMware User Group On the advice of a colleague and I was impressed at the technical content and approachability of all the attendees, I had expected it all to be a bit stand-offish and awkward, but it was the polar opposite, I think I hold the (dubious) record for presenting at every London VMUG meeting for 2 years straight, if nothing else it encouraged a whole raft of other people to present so they didn't have to listen to me again :) In 2011 I joined the steering committee for the London VMUG to assist with finding content and helped organise (and presented at) our 1st ever national UK event, which attracted over 300 attendees. I was awarded the vExpert title in 2009 and 2010 and 2011 and I continue to blog and contribute to LonVMUG and the wider community. What would you tell someone who wanted to get a job like yours to do? The most useful people in any industry are those that just get it done, it's very easy to find a reason to complain and say "it can't be done" it's a lot harder, but infinitely more valuable to say "it's tricky, but here is how I would do it, and these are the implications"; the most appropriate solution isn't always the "best" solution. Nobody can ever know everything about everything, but don't be afraid to say so; you can blag all you want, but it's going to burn you when you fail. The key to being successful if you want a varied and long career is to know a wide breadth of technology, but have the ability (and technical grounding) to learn specific areas quickly, learn from your mistakes and apply that knowledge. VMware have produced some of the most useful technologies to support this sort of activity, it's so easy to spin up some test VMs and just give something a go. Initiative is the most important attribute, if you are sitting in your chair complaining "my boss won't pay for training on X, thus I can't do it" then you're in trouble. Formalised professional development is all well and good, but people (employers) don't just give you things unless they have to (or there is a compelling tangible/commercial benefit to them doing so) and they're unlikely to do it on your timescales and say-so. The reality of the world is that if you want to be successful you're going to have to spend some of your own time and money if you want to better your career and knowledge beyond your day-job – you should view it as investment in  yourself, I've used this attitude throughout my career by investing in my own lab gear and study time for industry certifications and it's stood me well. Interest – if you're not interested in what you do, then this isn't for you – I'd hate to just have a day-job, I need something I'm interested and passionate about or I can't do it well.        Download VMware Products  | Privacy  | Update Feed Preferences          Copyright © 2012 VMware, Inc. All rights reserved.
  • vExpert Spotlight: André Pett
    vExpert Spotlight: André Pett VMware Community: a.p.Twitter handle: @ap_unleashedCurrent employer: Netzwerk GmbH (Germany)  How did you get into IT? During my apprenticeship as an electronics technician I got myself a Sharp PC-1500 with 2KB memory (for the younger audience, yes it's 2 Kilobytes, not 2 Gigabytes) on which I learned programming. About3 years later - after working as a technician in the US and Germany - I got a job at as a programmer in small company. While working as a programmer I had the opportunity to have projects in a lot of programming languages like BASIC, COBOL, TCL, STEP5, Pascal, C, Assembly language, Perl, ... This is something I still benefit from, when it comes toe.g. scripting. In the late 90s I started managing Client-Server infrastructures - mainly OS/2 LAN-Server and Windows environments - as well as Citrix MetaFrame farms (Application virtualization, as it is called nowadays). It then took another few years, before I was hired by my current company, where I work as a Sr. Consultant and - besides other things - started with VMware ESX 3.0. How did you get into working with VMware and becoming a 2011 vExpert? As mentioned before,vSphere is one part of my duties in the company I work for. One of the resources I used to get into virtualization and find help was - and still is - the VMware Communities, which IMO is one of the most active and professional forum. First I only used the forums to find answers to issues I had to solve, later I started "paying" back by helping other users solve their issues. Then - last year in November - I was asked whether I wanted to volunteer as a Communities User Moderater, to which I agreed. In April this year I was nominated for the VMware vExpert 2011 and finally at July, 1st I received the Welcome mail from John Troyer. What would you tell someone who wanted to get a job like yours to do? Love your job and love to work with other people. It may be a long way with ups and downs. However, with dilligence and patience you will reach your goal.        Download VMware Products  | Privacy  | Update Feed Preferences          Copyright © 2012 VMware, Inc. All rights reserved.
  • Oracle Linux 6.2
    Oracle Linux 6.2 Support for Oracle Linux 6.2 has been introduced for these products: ESX 4.1 Update 2 For more information about software and hardware support, please check the VMware Compatibility Guide        Download VMware Products  | Privacy  | Update Feed Preferences          Copyright © 2010 VMware, Inc. All rights reserved.
  • CentOS 6.2
    CentOS 6.2 Support for CentOS 6.2 has been introduced for these products: ESX 4.0 Update 4, ESX 4.1 Update 2 and ESXi 5.0 For more information about software and hardware support, please check the VMware Compatibility Guide        Download VMware Products  | Privacy  | Update Feed Preferences          Copyright © 2010 VMware, Inc. All rights reserved.
  • New Articles Published for Week Ending 11/26/11
    New Articles Published for Week Ending 11/26/11 Apache Tomcat Server fails with the error: java.lang.OutOfMemoryError: PermGen space (2009352) Date Published: 11/21/2011 Socialcast Socialcast Mobile Apps FAQ (2008689) Date Published: 11/21/2011 VMware ESX Powering on virtual machine on an NFS server fails with the error: Unable to retrieve the current working directory (1006539) Date Published: 11/22/2011 Security Audit account issues after an ESX install (1025565) Date Published: 11/24/2011 ESX host fails with Lost Heartbeat purple diagnostic screen mentioning VmkDev: 3102: Can't find serial# (2009232) Date Published: 11/21/2011 Missing VIB files for the be2iscsi CNA driver causes adapter errors (2009649) Date Published: 11/23/2011 An ESX 4.x host fails to boot with this message: MP-BIOS bug: 8254 timer not connect to IO-APIC error on ESX host boot (2009763) Date Published: 11/21/2011 ESX/ESXi 4.0 Update 4 and ESX 4.0 Patch Release ESX400-201110001/ESXi400-201110001 use the same VMware Tools OSP repository. (2009863) Date Published: 11/21/2011 VMware ESXi User defined xml firewall configurations are not persistent across ESXi host reboots (2007381) Date Published: 11/22/2011 Downloading, licensing, and enabling the VMware vSphere Storage Appliance (2009895) Date Published: 11/22/2011 Cannot vMotion a virtual machine from an ESX/ESXi 4.1 host to an ESXi 5.0 host (2009718) Date Published: 11/23/2011 VMware Datarecovery (VDR) backup fails with error "Trouble reading files, error -3943 ( open failed)" (2009673) Date Published: 11/23/2011 VMware Fusion Upgrading from VMware Fusion 4.1.0 and unsupported versions of Mac OS X (2009990) Date Published: 11/23/2011 VMware Horizon Application Manager ConnectorHorizon Connector does not support Active Directory binary attribute values (2009688) Date Published: 11/22/2011 VMware Service ManagerCustom fields are not tranferred when using Copy and Paste functionality (2009739) Date Published: 11/23/2011 VMware vCenter Server Default number of database connections in vCenter Server 4.1 (2004716) Date Published: 11/24/2011 Powering on a virtual machine fails after a storage outage with the error: could not open/create change tracking file (2009244) Date Published: 11/21/2011 VMware vCenter Server Heartbeat Disabling the vCenter Server Heartbeat Plug-in on vCenter Server (2009852) Date Published: 11/21/2011 Updating the vCenter Server Heartbeat configuration after changing the domain administrator password (2009856) Date Published: 11/21/2011 Setup Completion shortcut is missing on the secondary server after the restore (2009859) Date Published: 11/21/2011 vCenter Server Heartbeat Web Service logs consume excessive disk space (2009860) Date Published: 11/21/2011 VMware vCenter Site Recovery ManagerProtecting a virtual machine machine using Site Recovery Manager fails with the error: unable to find place holder datastore for the host (2007955) Date Published: 11/21/2011 VMware vCenter Update ManagerUploading an ESX upgrade bundle to vCenter Update Manager 5.0 fails with the error: Cannot upload file, because it is an invalid package (2009812) Date Published: 11/23/2011          Download VMware Products  | Privacy  | Update Feed Preferences          Copyright © 2010 VMware, Inc. All rights reserved.
  • vExpert Spotlight: Sohrab Kasraeian Fard
    vExpert Spotlight: Sohrab Kasraeian Fard Twitter: @KasraeianBlog URL: http://www.kasraeian.com  How did you get into IT? It was about two years before school when for the first time I saw “Computers” in my father’s working place. When I was in the 1st year of my high school, I get the chance of playing games on the computer and one year after that I get some lessons about computer and MS DOS. I can say those event's changed my life completely as I leaved my first university after 2 years of studying “Material Engineering – Ceramic Field” and went to the new university for studying “Computer – IT Field” and later on one of my professors invited me to his company and from then my IT career started.  How did you get into working with VMware and becoming a 2011 vExpert? I started using VMware products “VMware Workstation 6.x” and “VMware Server 1.x” before I'm moving to the new university for studying computer-IT (more than 6 years ago). While I was in university I started using these two products more and more which lead me to help multiple professors to use "VMware Workstation" for their courses and classes. During this process I faced multiple problems which lead me to the "VMware Community" for the first series. About 2 years ago I started studying for "Microsoft MCITP EA" certificate and for testing multiple scenarios and configuration I managed to build my own "Home Lab" and that was the first time I start using VMware ESXi 3.5 on my devices; running "VMware ESXi 3.5" on the white-boxes in that time got a lot of problems which lead me to the VMware Community (VMTN) again. As the result of using “VMware ESXi 3.5” I changed my goals and get my VCP4 certificate before my MCITP EA certificate. I got a lot of helps from SMEs, posts and documents inside and outside of VMTN. In that point I started looking for a way to at least answering parts of helps which I received and paying back to the community by sharing information I got and helping others (if it's possible); and this year I got the honor of being awarded as the "vExpert 2011". What would you tell someone who wanted to get a job like yours to do? I think, spending time and money for IT and especially in the matters which person interested on would get its result if good motivation and good goal being exist as well. Try to be a better and better person in company and among friends and don’t stop putting more and more times on subjects, learning and for sure sharing them and finally never doubt about asking questions.        Download VMware Products  | Privacy  | Update Feed Preferences          Copyright © 2010 VMware, Inc. All rights reserved.
  • vExpert Spotlight: Michael Letschin
    vExpert Spotlight: Michael Letschin Blog URL: www.thesolutionsarchitect.netTwitter handle: @mletschinCurrent employer: Convergence Technology Consulting How did you get into IT? As a cadet at the Air Force Academy, each cadet squadron has a computer clerk and in my sophomore year, that was my job.  Essentially a help desk tech for the 60+ person squadron for small computer issues. After transferring to the University of Maryland, I needed a job to pay for school. I found a position working on websites for the university and so began my IT career. After a few strokes of good luck and moving into systems part-time in college and then full-time through my senior year, I had become a systems admin. After college, I took a position doing small to medium outsourcing and moved through the ranks into IT management. Over the past few years, I have moved into more of a pre-sales/architecture position. How did you get into working with VMware and becoming a 2011 vExpert? I began working with VMware back in the 2.0 days when we still had to decide between ESX and GSX.  I had the great fortune of migrating a few companies through some consulting engagements from 2 to 2.5 to 3 to 4 and now have designed a few engagements with vSphere 5. As for my vExpert time, I feel that has much to do with my time blogging and participating in the weekly VMware Communities Podcast. I began blogging for my company blog and found that there were some topics that were better said outside a corporate umbrella and started thesolutionsarchitect.net. I now continue to blog on virtualization topics for both my corporate blog at convergentech.us as well as on my personal site. The podcast has been a huge growth point for me and has spawned great friendships and learning chances.  I also had the opportunity to host a daily podcast at VMworld this past year with other vExperts. What would you tell someone who wanted to get a job like yours to do? If you are looking to move from being a systems admin to an architect or pre-sales, my best advice would be to learn as much as you can about as many topics you can across the realm of IT.  During your IT career you often come to crossroads to determine how your career will progress, stay technical or become a manager, focus on a single product or be a generalist. Most architects I know have moved into management at some point and chose to be a generalist but with some specific product set that they are especially good at. The next thing to do would be to learn about the business side of IT. IT decisions are not normally made solely for the technical purpose but normally with a balance of technical and financial costs.  I continued on my education to get an MBA and it gave me invaluable knowledge of business.  You don’t need to go get an MBA, but you should look to expand your knowledge to understand the basics like ROI, capex vs, opex, and cost of capital.        Download VMware Products  | Privacy  | Update Feed Preferences          Copyright © 2010 VMware, Inc. All rights reserved.
  • Guest Post: How to write a book or blog (Part 3)
    Guest Post: How to write a book or blog (Part 3) General tips, recommendations and comments: Go back and answer those questions posed at the beginning of this piece to help determine the best route for getting your book or blog published. Find, develop and refine your voice or writing style including approach, tone and focus. Seek help and advice from others, be mindful of their time and in return, see how you can help them with something. Likewise find a project that is open to having you join in as a collaborator or put your own collaboration together. Do not be afraid to ask others who are already published to participate. Get your blog up and running if it isn’t already, and use that to help organize your thoughts, then evolve those ideas into an outline for your book. This will be handy when you put a proposal together for a publisher. Leverage your blog or website as a repository and portfolio which can complement your book as well as serve as a quick reference of your other works. Go to http://storageioblog.com and my main site http://storageio.com to see examples of how things interact and tie back to each other, ranging from articles, tips, and reports, to events and videos among other items. For a book project, have a plan that includes research, administration, writing, editing, proofing, layout, composition and other production activities along with promotion. Understand your time constraints for doing all these things, factoring in other projects, work, family and time to sleep. When you get writer’s block which you will, having other things to do, such as administrative work, figures or diagrams design, research or editing can be a great way to productively use the time while you can’t write. Another tip is to maintain a list of ideas and items that end up on the cutting room floor (things that do not make it into the actual product) so you something to go to when you hit a writer’s block moment. Conduct a make vs. buy decision similar to what you may do in your IT job. That is, you can write it yourself, or you can have it written for you. With my books, I do them the old-fashioned way, which is to write them myself working with a publisher and their publishing service to handle production items. But celebrities and politicians are not the only ones who have ghost writers, as they can be a cost effective way for an executive or a busy professional to trade money for time. Talk with different publishers to see what they will do for you and how you can work with them, as well as if it is a good fit for both parties. At the beginning of this piece I mentioned questions to ask and one of those is important: Why are you looking to write and publish a book? If the topic is narrow with a small target audience, a traditional or specialty publisher is not a good fit, you may want to look at self-publishing. If you are sensitive to others editing and rearranging your work, either develop thicker skin or avoid working a formal publisher, as rest assured, their style will differ from yours. However when working with publishers, you can compromise on style and grammar, but make sure that you maintain your voice, tone and editorial objective. Leverage publishing services for copy editing, proofing, layout, pagination, indexing, glossaries and other pre-press functions. There are many services as well as individuals that can do these tasks for you. If you are simply looking to become a published book author, you can take shortcuts such as signing up with some of the eBook sites. Some venues will pay you to write what effectively is a long “white paper” that they in turn publish as an eBook with or without somebody sponsoring it. Regardless of whether you are going to self-publish, ePublish or go with a traditional publisher, your success will depend on what you are willing to do in order to market and promote it. Needless to say, there are many more things to talk about pertaining to writing a book, creating a blog or producing videos, podcasts etc., however it is time for us to wrap up for now. Feel free to drop me a note with any questions that I can address. Also let me know when you get your blog up and running or your book published. Cheers,Gs [How to write a book or blog, Part 1][How to write a book or blog, Part 2]  About the author Greg Schulz is founder of Server and StorageIO, an IT industry advisory consultancy firm, and author of the books Cloud and Virtual Data Storage Networking (CRC Press, 2011), The Green and Virtual Data Center (CRC Press, 2009), and Resilient Storage Network (Elsevier, 2004). Learn more atwww.storageio.com, www.storageioblog.com or on twitter @storageio.          Download VMware Products  | Privacy  | Update Feed Preferences          Copyright © 2010 VMware, Inc. All rights reserved.
  • A week in virtualization
    A week in virtualization This week we released new versions of ThinApp, Horizon App Manager, and vCloud Connector. ThinApp 4.7 integrates with Horizon 1.2 now, to allow you to easily manage your virtualized applications on Windows. The new capabilities include dynamic entitlements, secure single sign-on, a management interface, and monitoring and reporting. The new vCloud Connector 1.5 will help you transfer workloads between clouds more reliably and efficiently.  Users can now view VMs and templates across multiple clouds and perform basic operations through a new Web-based UI of vcloud.vmware.com. Read more on blogs.vmware.com You can also read more about these releases on Facebook. The vCloud team has shared a link to their announcement, which contains a comprehensive list of features and screen shots. Visit facebook.com/vmwarevcloud to find that link. VMware Horizon has also shared their announcement, as well as other people’s blog posts about the new release on their Facebook page. Find all these links at facebook.com/vmwarehorizon VMware View has shared a link to a blog post about resource optimization in View 5. The team is also running a 500/250 promotion, in which you can get 25% off the license list price for a 500-pack of View Premier and 18% off the license list price for a 250-pack of View Premier. Promotion ends December 15, so hurry on to facebook.com/vmwareview to get that discount. Our Fusion team is happy to share the news that Macworld has declared Fusion 4 “fast and stable… about as easy as it gets.” You can find that at facebook.com/vmwarefusion We have two webcasts scheduled, one about Virtualization - VMware and IBM on the Critical Steps to Successful Cloud Computing, and another is the vSphere 5 QuickStart Series Part 3: Management with VMware vCenter Server Go to webcasts.vmware.com to see them and to register. The VMware Forum has concluded its tour around the world, but you can still register for on-demand delivery. One last stop is left on the schedule for Vancouver on the 7th of December. Find out more and register. The following VMUGs are going to be meeting over the next week: Philadelphia, Toledo, Myrtle Beach, Canberra, San Antonio, Darwin, Sydney, Tasmania, and Saskatoon. There will be a full-day user summit in Brisbane on December 5th, and a full-day user conference in Kansas City on December 6th, which will feature our gracious host John Troyer. Also the Dutch VMUG is having their full-day conference on the 9th.        Download VMware Products  | Privacy  | Update Feed Preferences          Copyright © 2010 VMware, Inc. All rights reserved.

VMware Tweets


Twitter / VMware
{IFRAME}

Editor-in-Chief

Image
Peter Heigis is the Founder of 4subcontract and Chief Architect at Sublime Solution. read more...

VIPs

Top Searches

What's hot in the virtualization arena

Virtually Social


V - News Feeds

V - Blogs

V - Forums

Q&A

V - Knowledge Base

Virtualization Dictionary

V - Tutorials

Virtualization Videos

The "V" Files

Document Library